A fine film, to be sure. But my “Bullitt” is “Boogie Nights”.
My dad’s were the magnificent seven and guns over navarone. Mine Bullitt, Das Boot, Raiders, Last Star Fighter, Battle Beyond the Stars.
All the carefully-photographed rich detail in Bullitt pulls me back to the time in a way that temporal recreations like Mad Men can never do.
1968 was a phenomenal year for movies, perhaps the best ever.
When the bad guy buckles his seat belt it’s time to pay attention.
Can you now remember how many hubcaps does the Charger lose? If not watch it once more.
I’ve seen the Norman Jewison Jesus Christ Superstar close to 3 million times.
Pretty sure I saw Bullitt as a three year old on first release. One of my earliest memories is of the motorbike crash, and my dad talking later about how McQueen must have done that stunt.
McQueen had a horrifying childhood, just a little better than Charley Manson’s. If he had not stumbled into acting, he almost certainly would have gone to prison for killing someone. As it was, he was allegedly on Charles Manson’s death list. His squinty suspicious look was all natural.
he keeps passing the same VW bug in that scene, too.
When i sing “everything’s alright” to calm my fussy baby, I’m definitely doing my best Yvonne…
…at least once more?
I love Bullitt.
Didn’t Bullitt’s partner who gets shot survive?
And the ability of both cars to teleport goes unremarked-on in the script. If they can do that, why are they driving around at all?
McQueen is the coolest. The jazz score is tops. I am not usually put out by a slow burn – for instance, I number Blade Runner among my favorite films, and that movie is about as slow as they come. But for some reason Bullitt bores me to tears.
heh, nice map. The first episode of Walking Dead looks like they’re going thru the city, but it’s all different angles of one block’s worth of Atlanta. like, they round a corner and keep going, but they’re re-running down the same block. Really weird, particularly since I used to work on the next block over.
speaking of SF and teleportation, ever see Quicksilver? Set in NYC, Bacon and Fishburne decide to a bike race, start racing, and are suddenly in SF. When the race is over, they are instantly back in NYC. NOTHING IS EVER SAID.
I guess it was supposed to be a nod to the only other US city with a messenger culture (at the time) but it is sooooooo blatantly ridiculous.
Movies in Washington DC are especially notorious for wormholes, misplacing monuments, and rerouting the Potomac.
DC geography errors were something of trope in the X-Files, but they were filming in Vancouver anyway.
It’s not teleportation, it’s wormholes. Still got to drive from one to another.
It’s also why they kept passing that green VW: the wormholes weren’t quite syncronised to the same time. Bullitt’s obviously a time cop, that’s why he’s allowed to break causality as well as speeding laws.
4 Spaghetti westerns (GBU,FFOD,FFDM,OAATITW), Bullitt and a 1973 movie I’d like to recommend to Jason Weisberger.
Kinda Like Bullitt but take’s place in NYC.
The Seven-Ups
Movie is on youtube also it seems.
And The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I’d recommend the book too. Early George V Higgins is good stuff.
